Ramiro Fernández Saus
At 50 years old, Ramiro Fernandez Saus (Sabadell, 1961) has become one of the most illustrious Spanish artists of his generation. In 2005 he was given a retrospective at the Museum of Sabadell and his work are in numerous public and private collections, including the collections of the Reine Sofia in Madrid, and the Albertina Museum in Vienna.
His paintings are inescapably charming. Tigers, monkeys, parrots, zebras and sailors are amongst the cast, all happily playing in exotic lands, in country houses, and on sea voyages. Even the interiors are undiscovered landscapes: wallpaper patterns become jungles; a captain’s cabin is hung with framed paintings of his ship on storm-tossed seas.
Along with the charm, they also have an imaginative depth. Ramiro returns us to a colonial age full of the mystery and delight of the undiscovered. This is a world charged with a genuine naivety. He conveys so brilliantly the uncomplicated joy of the explorer encountering new lands, and in turn, the native encountering Western civilisation.There are no shadows: all is strange and bright and wondrous.
These fantasies of nineteenth century lives are surprising in the range of their preoccupations: from whalers in the Arctic to a dog gazing at his reflection in an elaborately decorated dressingroom.
Increasingly in the artist’s oeuvre there is a preoccupation with eroticism and vivid imaginings of the adventures of Don Juan and Casanova.
The voluptuous colours and dream-infused reality – the way that ordinary objects become peculiarly riveting – are reminiscent of Magic Realism: that is his literary counterpart and, if anything, his defining movement. There is also a strong kinship with Craigie Aitchison – the artists are devoted to each other’s work, and they meet whenever Ramiro is in London.
Since Sarah Long and Carolyn Ryle-Hodges discovered Ramiro’s work in 1989 whilst he was on an exchange program at the Delfina Studios, he has shown regularly at Long & Ryle. His last exhibition there, ‘illuminations’’, sold out from the catalogue – before any of the works had even arrived in the country.